Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Evolution of Quantum Travel

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   Hello and welcome to another episode of Around the Verse, our weekly look at Star Citizen's ongoing development. I'm Sandi Gardner. And I'm Chris Roberts and I've just come back from Europe. Yes, he has. Today's feature sets its sights on the quantum travel system. With so much distance between celestial objects, this feature is an essential part of where your journey starts. Uh it sure is, but before we get to that, let's see what progress the team has made on Alpha 3.0 in this week's installment of Burn Down. Burn Down? Welcome back to Burn Down, our weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.0. We've been working through each of our designated categories as laid out in our previous episode as well as on the production schedule, which are shopping, missions, ship and vehicles, traversal, MobiGlass and overall performance and

2. 00:01:03

   stability. Let's go to the team and see how each are progressing. So, commodities, commodity shopping polish. So, basically there's Chris for you Chris prioritize Simon White's tasks. There's some Simon White polish that is needed. However, Chris wanted the item 2.0 stuff to be taken care of first so that there's just the final tasks that are on Simon White. Like basically it feels like you've got stuff to get like all the features in and the content in and then you've got polish stuff like the shopping or the ships, right? Right. Fair enough. Fair enough. Good. So, these are the kiosks we've been looking at.

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   These are the original ones. They're they're very kind of the feedback we got was that they were feel very kind of like tacked on. The the screen are a bit small. Um so it's a little, you know, the experience isn't necessarily best for the for the for the player. Um so basically we've been looking to take this generic uh kiosk and create something a bit more bespoke for the stores. And so it's very close to being complete. I said the terminals are all set up so we know that any work that we're doing now can get plugged in and will just work. Um this one here is finished for Paula so. I'm currently working myself on the uh counter for Levski which is or the kiosk for Levski which is almost done. Uh other members of the team are pushing hard to get the counters for different areas of bizarre bargains. Uh no sorry, not bizarre bargains. Um Dumpers Depot and other stores from around the game. Um each will have their own like unique

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   and bespoke uh kiosks and uh shopping counters and stuff and yes, it it's it's very close to complete and Just to move on to the two above the shopping physical shop polish um and actually Ekhart and Rudo. Um Todd's got to sync with Jake and Reiniger um for the work being done on that because he's still got some I I already did that. Okay. That's what I was doing before. Okay, cool. So So Jake is very confident that they'll be able to finish it in in that time. So for 3.0 we've got uh several several NPCs that we're working on. Uh a couple of which are the mission givers. Uh we got Ekhart who's obviously in Levski uh which you guys know about. We got Rudo who's also been coming along as well. These are both two very important characters because they're going to be responsible for doling out some of the

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   the content that you guys are going to have access to. We've been capturing a few few more animations for Ekhart which is is going to help fill out his set of animations. Um Allow us to do um the the intro conversation and you know, the follow-up conversations after that. So really kind of separate those experiences for the players. Um We've been handing this this work off to the Frankfurt office. So we got Vitus Okunis, uh we got Chris Speek who's also helping out uh under the Dan Trupin's team. Um so, it's really been kind of a global effort to kind of get these guys together uh as we focus on closing out shopping here. And Keewee literally like 10 minutes ago just gave

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   me this issue um where spawning a second ship blacks out the entire environment and removes all movement controls for everybody on the server, which is absolutely bizarre. That is such a weird Yeah, exactly. multi bug. It's like So, this like I said, this was present on um the 814 build that we kicked off before lunch. And I'm looking at the spookiest bug, which is if you spawn a ship and then a second ship all the lights in all the server go out and you disappear and everybody this happens to everybody and you can't move. So, the programming hand is working on the uh the the overheat field on uh the heat MFD.

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   Uh I am uh I've discovered I've noticed that we aren't displaying the uh ship uh global heat pool anywhere, which is a thing by the way. Uh so, we should probably have that. So, I'm going to be adding that in today, probably talking with Max about where I get that information from that wasn't able to track it all down uh last time, but that's the the current thing that I'm working on. And at the minute in the closed down for 3.0, I'm looking after kind of three main chunks of work that really is six individual features. These three segments of work are IFCS and flight balance and that's comprised of atmospheric flight, second stage stage afterburner, and also gravlev polishing tuning. All these were two tasks that we

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   checked with Todd this morning, which we promised to the epic. Um which was the modified atmospheric flight model, which was the first one we talked about. The second one was the atmospheric switch over trig- triggered by the level of ship drag, which was the second one Andy mentioned. As I understand it And Todd said this is high priority then So Todd's Todd said the proposal that we took to Todd was the first one, the modified atmospheric flight model was the one that we wanted. The second one, which was the atmospheric switch over, hopefully will be easy to get. Um however, if it runs into any problems, we're also happy to push that to 3.1. So the minute that that becomes a longer task than anticipated, we can shove that to 3.1. Recently um I've been like since that meeting, I've been um

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   as I said, smoothing this transition and uh modifying the accelerations of the flight control system as you're flying around. Um so that you don't get these sudden changes in acceleration, which you feel very strongly as your ship suddenly feeling not maneuverable. and before that um it was it was a case of finding um some sort of a system where we could consistently control this in say like for example, we need to deal with decoupled. And that's that was quite a challenge because currently decoupled and and coupled fly quite differently. And the system needs to work consistently on both sides. So I put a lot of time into making sure that you can use it in decouple and it sort of behaves the similarly, so that you're not like,

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    you know, you don't want this huge discrepancy between how it works in two different modes. Um so we sort of worked and I worked and like implemented um the system where it it will only go to the higher speeds if you're on a straight line and if you try and modify your velocity, it will it will kick you out or it'll try and slow you down again. Because of some of the issues we've had with this um afterburner velocity on the straight line going up, we found that you you would easily switch but from SCM, you just want to kick into afterburner and you'd find yourself going really fast into these um high velocities. One of the ways we also considered fixing that was to to

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    to go back a little bit on some of the stuff we'd done before where you'd have SCM on a much smaller scale. We want to give the combat maneuvering a larger range so that you wouldn't need to rely on afterburner quite so much. So, I've been doing a large pass on the all the ships in the game right now on their SCM velocities and all the accelerations based around that. Basically just scaling them up so that you've got more velocity to play with. But I haven't messed with the acceleration so that should be carried over um from the current build. be on the actual um star map. Um basically, Leo's done most of his stuff on the code side and Todd's said that it's okay. The main thing is just cuz we rearranged some of Zane's stuff. We just want to see where some of Zane's stuff

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    comes in now. Star map in the movie glass. Star map in the ship is is uh scroll down, Ricky. It's a later uh sprint that one, the ship to radar. It's it's just under ships. Um and to where that one is right now is Oleg is finishing his um his his work for basically what a 2D one would look like versus what a 3D one would look like. And then at that point ship art and tech in um are in the sprint with us right now. So, then they can do their work needed for the radar item and get those things positioned so then Bone and his team can do their work. The past few months I've been working on getting the radar into the star map system. Um and I've decided to go kind of like in a component based system. So if you

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    add star map then you can interact with star map. Uh and if you add on top of that radar uh component you can zoom in to yourself and suddenly this radar pops out kind of. And if you remove the star map again then you just see the radar uh on on your display. So that's kind of the way I'm uh I'm trying to go and we can always add different components to that so to expand like the functionality of this display. But I just kind of wanted to go over with you. I think the switching of the galaxy and local area uh because I think most most times you see horizontal uh zoom sliders usually the uh macro uh views to the left

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    rather than to the right. So that's just kind of why um had that on the galaxy on the left side. Yeah. Um I just and then there's probably some stuff that I need to clean up in regards to the uh nav map and radar scale button so that there it's clearer that they're toggles. Um but in general um I sort of think that it'd be a good idea at least to get Chris's eyes on on this if he hasn't seen it yet. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Well, I want to have I want to have Yeah. So for the what the cases where you like press buttons and turn you know dial turn knobs and things like that I think it should be diagetic like you actually have it labeled in the universe and you can see it. And then that's why you have that like thing you know the finger press icon that use it when it's there and then

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    optionally you can have translation which is like the case here. Um and then when something becomes a bit more complicated and you can have you have more than one thing you can do with it, then it would have a multi option. So the mission uh app uh manager and uh the MobiGlass went to review. We got some feedback and we are changing uh some stuff that we got from the reviews. we have polished a couple of features that uh we got. Uh so we now have the ability to actually view the remaining time of uh that a mission has. Uh we have all the information, the description, who was it from, how much time, what what's the payment going to be. Uh we can actually

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    accept these missions, we can track them on our accepted list. We can also untrack them now. Um there's the ability to actually know which which which we're actually tracking. we also have the possibility when abandoning a mission we can actually go to the history and actually know now which missions are abandoned, completed, midway, basically. So if we see here like we now have information about all of these missions. It's a much sleeker user experience that they have now um making it easier for the players to actually uh keep track of all the objectives that they need to do to finish the missions. Uh actually having a proper way to manage uh their

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    missions. Imagine if they're midway through a mission and they see like, "Oh, I have a really nearby mission that I can do." They can actually easily manage these options. As for the performance topic, it's of course that the closer you get to an release, the more important it becomes. And but on the other on the other side, you you have to see that performance is nothing that will be done at one point. It's not like a feature that we can complete and then then it's done. It's something that we will always have to deal with. That's overarching the whole project. And as I said, it's of course becoming more and more important the closer you get to an release because we of course want to provide the best experience for the

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    players, smooth. and that's why we're now looking into the into the performance captures from the Evocati players, um basically always. So, it's it's not just testing a specific feature, but we're always looking into those captures and see where we can uh possibly shave off another millisecond or another frame. Where can we possibly save some something or optimize so we we get the smoothness to you. This week alone, we've checked in 756 updates to our 3.0 branch in Perforce in every possible category. You'll see from category to category how unpredictable progress can be as the Evocati testers and our internal QA work together to uncover new issues while leadership

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    evaluates what's absolutely necessary to address to release 3.02 PTU as quickly as possible. So, come back next week to see the progress we're making here on Burndown. If you would like more info on our schedule as we work towards the upcoming release of Alpha 3.0, be sure to check out the website for our weekly production report. Yeah, definitely do that. But, now it's time to spool up this week's feature on quantum travel where we look at the updates coming in Alpha 3.0 that make the system more dynamic. With the old quantum travel system, you would select a destination, spool up the quantum drive, and zip through space to that location. It was the same experience regardless of where you were going. Yeah, it works, but considering how distance is going to be much more of a factor going forward, 3.0 and beyond, we knew it was something that we wanted to

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    improve. That's why we decided to vary your travel speed and effects based on the distance traveled. That way a trip between Earth and the Moon would look and feel very different than a trip between Earth and Jupiter or in our initial case, the Stanton system. So, between somewhere like Levski and um I don't know. ArcCorp? ArcCorp, perhaps, yes. There we go. There you go. To learn more, let's check out our feature on the updated quantum travel Anywhere you want to go that's not like 100 ft from you, you're probably a quantum going to be involved. So, there was the old quantum system which I believe is what's actually up on the live server now cuz we're still working

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    on the new stuff. You look in some random direction and you fire off and you go. And it was great. Had visual effects and everything. Um problem is uh designers weren't happy. And CR wanted it to be a little bit different because we were going to have bigger maps. And he wanted it to function differently. The previous system basically said I want to fire from here to here and go. A set max velocity, everything, and you just went. There was no concept of ramping or Well, there was a slight concept of ramping, but it was very linear. So, if you were a short jump or a long jump, it it felt the same. And CR wanted the experience of having something completely different where if there was a a moon and I'm going I'll say if from Earth to the Moon, it's far,

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    but it's considered a short jump. A long jump would be like from Earth to Pluto. So, from uh Earth to to um uh the moon, he wanted us kind of feel like a little bit slower cuz you don't reach that max top speed while is the one that Pluto, you reach that top speed. But, he didn't want to like a linear increase to it. He wanted more of a dramatic build up to get to there. So, we were experimenting with a bunch of ways of getting to that point and one of um the ideas that came out in the very early of prototype staging was uh the concept of a really nail down the concept of a short jump and a concept of a long jump. And the first implementation was just a binary system. That mean, oh, if we're

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    at this certain distance, we're a short jump. If we're at this distance, we're a long jump. And what that gave us is different speeds. So, when you went from Earth to to the moon, it took a little bit longer to get there because you weren't going as fast. You could kind of enjoy the scenery and you just run. And then when you went to Pluto, we gave you a much bigger speed so you just zoomed by to get to there. But, you still have the problem of it being linear and it didn't have that build up. You just started increasing and you got there and you just stopped. Um we're missing that ramping up smoothness. And it was since it was a binary system, if you had the distance just slightly off, it would change from short jump to a long jump. So, if I'm going from Earth to Mars, if that distance was just

24. 00:18:46

    enough and I flew a little bit, it would be considered long. If I flew back, it would be considered um short. And since depending upon what jump you're going to do, the effects, the sounds, and all that was completely different. And it didn't scale at all because yeah, it's it's one or the other. So, we went back to the drawing board going, all right, he wants that ramping and design really wants that like curve. And what we were doing was um we use um motion we use a constant acceleration. So, you start at a velocity and you had an end velocity and you literally did a linear curve as you accelerated over time or uh your velocity increased over time. But, that gives you that straight line,

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    which is not what we wanted. And so, what design wanted was like a little curve up. So, you could think of it like uh what was that movie? Back to the Future. You're in the DeLorean, you put the pedal to the metal, and you get the 88, that gives you a nice little curve, but then as soon as you hit that 88, you ramp up like crazy. So, you want that initial speed up so you can kind of go, all right, I'm accelerating, I'm accelerating, and you hit that boom phase and then it just goes whoosh. So, um went back to the drawing board, took a look at it, and said, what could we do? Well, we're like, all right, acceleration's giving us linear. What happens if we go one higher? From that famous movie, we'll we'll go to 11. Well, in this case, we'll go one higher uh into the thing called jerk.

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    What jerk is, we have a constant jerk, and we're having velocity and acceleration change over time. So, what that gives you is instead of your velocity being like this, it goes that little curve. if we use jerk to figure out how fast we're going to go at any given point, we can get rid of that binary system and we just choose a position, and we know the maximum speed of the drive, we know the maximum uh or the minimum speed, we could calculate the min acceleration, the max acceleration based off the jerk, and ramp us up. So, what that gave us is no matter where we choose on the star map, whatever location, we'd get that nice little curve. So, if I was going to um like Mars,

27. 00:21:11

    I would accelerate and hit this uh Mac the speed and then decelerate again. But, if I was going to Pluto, I'd go all the way up even higher speed, cruise a little bit, and then go down. So, it gives you that more short-term long-jump hybrid sort of um uh experience. And because it's no longer a binary or system where it's either short or um long, it's based off of the distance, we can tweak all of our effects to be based off speed. So, um when you're accelerating up, if you don't hit a certain speed, you don't get the tunnel effect. You just get these like little sparkles cuz you're not hitting that uh I don't know, like a sound barrier of the quantum. You're hit- You're not hitting the quantum barrier. You're going just right before it. You are

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    going faster, but you're not hitting the barrier to break the sound. So, you have the little effects, and then you dipped out of it. But, if you go a little bit further out, you hit the barrier, so we trigger on the effects, and it it makes a much more dramatic thing. So, it gives you that all right, I get to a system, uh there's a planet, I select one of the planets, I can get closer to it, but I don't see the tunneling effect. But, if I go click out something further out, I go bam, go out and see the tunnel. It's quite a cool little interesting thing. And um while doing this, since um the math is kind of involved, we actually prototyped it out in a completely different um executable, so we could give designers saying, "Hey, plug these in and see the graphs, see the velocity, see the accelerations." It's pretty cool.

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    When I came on, my uh my first role here was starting the quantum travel conversion to 2.0. At the time, yeah, I mean, it did obviously uh fly it's not I mean, it just wasn't able to integrate well, and it would be very It'd be a totally different set of code, basically, from how everything else works. So, bringing it over brings all that together. We get to use all the connections and stuff we natively get just being item 2.0. Uh plus the old drive, while it worked, had been kind of built alongside the design, so there was a lot of code in there that, while it worked, wasn't necessarily needed to be go a certain way. It was really more getting it hooked where we could attach it to a 2.0 ship, but also getting it connecting to the pipe system for power, for heat, for things of that nature, for the fuel Um the old drive didn't use any of that

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    mechanics cuz it wasn't compatible. So, with the new system, as Max was building out pipes for fuel and power, I was able to start attaching those as well. The effects for the quantum travel consisted of this tunneling effect originally. So, we've Chris has asked for more of an adaption to this. So, we had he wants it more of a sort of Hollywood feel of a Star Trek key sort of effect where this residue appears from the front of the ship and moves to the back of the ship. And then it just starts with a spooling stage that hits this acceleration rate, which is, as Chris puts, reaching the 88 mph like in Back to the Future. So, once you get through the spooling stage, it's a mixture of residue just starting to build up from the front. And it just builds up more and more, and

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    then it just flares up, and then you hit a big bang, which is like the entry effect into the quantum travel. So, the star field effect was just primarily this effect with loads of stars appearing and whizzing past with planets and some all the way to your destination as you travel. This new effect we've added in is it adds more of a residue from the front of the ship that cones around the front of the nose of the ship and then leaves out more like whizzing flares. Kind of what couldn't be done with the original CPU system. If So, we had to use this new particle GPU system to add in thousands of dots that just throw off residue. What we originally had was this blue sort of plasma effect, but then Chris wanted to add in more color, so we've grabbed in some of the colors from the engine trails, which we recently

32. 00:25:12

    added. So, we've got like for the Mustang for example or the Freelancer or stuff, we've got like this sort of teal-y blue effect that mixed in with the blue plasma and the M50 has like a more yellowy orange and a blue effect mixed in. So, game code provide us these these tags and triggers, which are like spooling, the entry, the traveling effect, and the flash effect. So, these all trigger at certain parts of the stages. So, the spooling effect would trigger between the acceleration phase and when you enter. So, then the enter effect would trigger when you enter to traveling. So, then the traveling effect will loop as you're traveling from your destination to your to your other destination. So, then once you hit your destination, it hits a

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    flash entry or flash exit effect. And then it will So, the exit effect is this basically a big flash lens flare with a big explosion sort of wispy smoke trails and traveling from where you exited basically. Going back to what quantum drive is, um we have two parts to that specifically. One design aspect, what does design want? What does CR want? And that was the the slow ramping up and keeping that little curve. And coming out of that, you know, we play with the Excel, we play with the little program to figure out uh the math involved. The second part is, "Okay, we have this math. It's jerk. There's formulas for it. We have pages and pages of how we could calculate it, which is

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    cool, but how do we translate that into the game?" And that's always the tricky part. Um now fortunately for us, um jerk, constant jerk with acceleration and velocity, we know certain parts of the formula, so we can adapt that into programming into different parts. And how we did that was there's actually five phases of quantum drive. There's the initial ramp, which is um you're going from zero to the 88 mph. We're actually going to replace that to going from your current speed to afterburner, cuz we finally have afterburner. Um so you can think of that as going from zero to your afterburner, or whatever your speed is. That's just the linear velocity. So that's one block where we

35. 00:27:36

    have to calculate the distance and the speed. So once we calculate that, we put it here. Then we have the ramp up phase, which is where we introduce the jerk of your curve to figure out what your maximum speed is. And we calculate that stuff, we put it Then we have the middle part, which is the cruise. So if you were actually to hit the maximum speed of your drive, we have to stay in this top speed for a while, and then kick out. So we put that here. Then we have the ramp down and the the speed down, which are the same as the speed up and ramp up, but just inverted to go from your top down. So we have put all those on the side, we go, "Okay, what if do we need to get this functional?" Um we have all the math, and we have all

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    the time. That's another fun thing. It's we needed this system to be predictable. So if I knew the start time and the end time, I need to know where I am at any given point. So we need an analytical solution. And lucky for us, those have all been derived off Newtonian physics for years, which is awesome. Um so knowing those key five parts, uh we broke it down into um distance. So, we know if we know the distance, uh we could do a couple of things. We could figure out the speed up phase. We know the the velocities, and we know the current velocity, we could figure out the distance we'll be there and there. We could figure out the distance it would take to hit max. And then we do that on both sides. We

37. 00:29:11

    leave the cruise out. And that gives us um the ability to things. One, if we're able to hit top speed. If we're able to hit top speed, it makes the formula so beautiful. We could do the easy path. And then, if we can't do the top speed, this is where it gets complicated cuz we have to solve a I think it was a fourth-order uh polynomial. And that math is just bonkers, so I'll spare you the details. Um but we had to solve that fun guy using a very quick and dirty solution to make sure that it's performance not just performance-heavy. So, we calculate all the distances that you're going to be in each one. And then from there, we could calculate And then we split it out and save the information. It's called a quantum

38. 00:29:58

    snapshot. So, we figure out the distance you'll be, we'll figure out where you're going to be at any point in time, and then from there, when we pass in a time, we can go, "All right, we're uh this time we're going to be at phase ramp down." So, at ramp down phase, and then we go, "Oh, no, we're going to rewind back." Okay, we're actually here. So, we have this time which allows us to go uh kind of backwards and forwards if we wanted to. Um one, uh this is for networking. Two, if we wanted to for um track view for our cinematic sequences, we can wind back in time. Um so, it makes it everything nice and easy. And beautiful. But, it took quite a long time to figure out the math, figure out how to break down everything so it works in networking, works in multiplayer,

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    works in track view, works in cinematics. One solution that works in all the fun details. But, because it's timeline-based, we could rewind back and forward. We could play effects depending upon where we are on the timeline. And it just works beautifully. Lots and lots of coffee to get here. So, as you saw, it took a lot of tweaking and complex math to get the quantum travel system working the way we wanted it. But, now we have a system that provides a more dynamic and varied gameplay experience for Alpha 3.0 and beyond. And that's all for today's episode. Thanks to all of our subscribers for helping us make Around the Verse and our other shows like Bug Smashers and Citizen of the Stars. This month's subscriber flare will also be released on Friday, so be sure to keep an eye out

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    for it. Yep, definitely do that. And a big thanks to all our backers for your support. This game is only possible because of your dedication and enthusiasm and allow us to make a first-person universe unlike any other. So, thank you very much. And finally, to be sure to tune in to Happy Hour Game Dev tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. Pacific to watch level designers Andreas Johansson and Tobias Johansson construct a surface outpost live. Yes, and they're not even related. They are not, but they sit next to each other and yeah. Until next week, we'll see you around the verse. Thank you for watching. So, if you want

41. 00:32:37

    to keep up the and greatest in the Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.